﻿The essays that make up Broken and Shared were originally published bi-monthly over a forty year period in the newspaper the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, The Catholic Agitator. Collected together for the first time in this book, these essays constitute Jeff Dietrich’s witness to poverty on Los Angeles’ Skid Row.

The vast scope of Jeff Dietrich’s essays introduces the reader to a world like no other. These essays combine the stories of poor women and men with a record of the author’s civil disobedience, with a chronicle of the city’s attitude of depraved indifference when it comes to the treatment of its poor, with a day-to-day history of the rapidly changing landscape that is downtown Los Angeles.

The arguments and analyses in this book are predicated on singular and radical readings of the Biblical texts in counterpoint with a varied and rich array of philosophical, literary, and critical ideas. Through the lens of Jeff Dietrich’s perspective and rooted in his life of self-imposed poverty, this book is both a prescription for change and an inspiration for how we might find ways to live more meaningful lives because we know the importance of caring for those who have nothing to offer but themselves.

Can’t Get No Satisfaction: The Political Economy of Empire and the Beheading of John the Baptist

Bread for Ducks but No Bread for the Poor

Please Save Our Soup Kitchen

Demonic Transubstantiation

Planting the Seed

Creative Cooking

Eating the Forbidden Fruit: The Problem of Industrial Agriculture 90 Exorcising the Demonic Food of Warmaking

Recovering Radical Memory

Christmas Appeal: The Poor Are Still with Us

PART THREE: The Church

Introduction

A Vision of the Church as Mother of the Poor

The Church Sex Scandal: Three-quarters of a Billion Dollar Settlement

The Great Cathedral Caper

The Silence of the Patriarchs from A to Z

The Power of the Cross: The Glory of the Mountain Top

Their Story Seemed like Nonsense: Women in the Gospel of Luke

Not by Bread Alone nor by Money and Ego

Dorothy Day and the Church

PART FOUR: Making Peace

My Crisis with the Draft

The Roots of Terrorism

No Blood for Oil

Redeeming the Soul of America: Voices from Exile

Getting Your Day in Court to be Among the Criminals

Reflections on September 11: We Are Still Pacifists

Military Success Justifies War in the New American Century

Catholic Workers are Still in Jail: We are Still Standing with the Victims

Jesus Wept

Middle East, War, Nukes, and Apocalypse

The Moral Captivity of Obama

Osama bin Laden: The Wicked Witch is Dead

PART FIVE: Resistance to Empire

Introduction

Divine Intervention

Casting Out Demons in Iraq

Defeating Empire with an Army of Dog Lappers

Torture: Exposing the Lie

Critiquing the Imperial Papacy

PART SIX: Technology and Alienation

Not by the Power of Demons

Doctrine of the Common Good as Gift Relationship

A Theology of Non-Power

PART SEVEN: The World We Have Lost

The Fall into Civilization

Anti-Christian Family Values

Burdening the Poor

Not One Stone upon Another

Wilderness Economics

PART EIGHT: Image Over Substance

Notes on Consumerism

Reagan’s America

Jesus Christ, Silver Surfer or Suffering Servant

Signs and Simulations

Sacrificing the Innocent

Propaganda: The Death of Democracy

Rejecting the Temptation to Tall Towers

Blind to Our Sin of Usury

PART NINE: Compassion as an Act of Seeing

Introduction

May the Angels Guide You to Heaven

My Continuing Education

I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning

The Homeless and Hopeless

Prophetic Hospitality

Appropriate Medicine

The Skid Row Death Row Connection

Compassionate Response to Suffering

Every Simple Thing

PART TEN: Abandoning the Poor

Hurricane Katrina Reveals a Nation in Which the Poor Are Abandoned

Renaissance or Resurrection

The Story of Jacob and the Homeless with a Stone for a Pillow

The Shopping Cart Campaign

The Universe Bends Towards Justice

Declaring a Cease-Fire in the Drug War

The Soloist: Fiddling while Los Angeles Burns

Epilogue The Catholic Worker Chronology Bibliography Index

"What you are doing is something beautiful for God."––Mother Teresa, Noble Laureate and Humanitarian

"The world looks brighter for rarities like Jeff Dietrich."––Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate and President’s Marymount Professor in Residence, Loyola Marymount University

"Jeff’s life-giving text held me enchanted, page after page, hours on end. I was at the mercy of a magister…a verbal magician, who is also, gift beyond price, a friend."––Daniel Berrigan, S.J., Activist and Poet

"This is the story of Jeff Dietrich’s lifelong effort to unite the will of the spirit with the work of the flesh. This entire work is deeply compelling. Through his personal, spiritual evolution and commitment to “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” he writes with self-deprecating humor and extraordinary insight, confronting his fears, and confirming his faith."––Martin Sheen, Actor and Activist

"For readers of the Agitator you have saved all the best and most challenging pieces over the years. For the uninitiated future readers of the Agitator, this is a one of a kind primer on the life of this courageous man, his community, and the newspaper he forged."––Joanne Kennedy, Managing Editor, “The Catholic Worker”

"Jeff Dietrich’s work is both authentic and important."––Jacques Ellul, Philosopher and Theologian

"Who are you, Jeff Dietrich? Wise guy, holy man, Dorothy Day fan, draft resister, genius editor, potato slicer, fund raiser, stargazer, word blazer, street smarty at a mystic party, who writes in and out of jail, never fail, for forty years with mindboggling compassion for the people of the streets."––James W. Douglass, Catholic Worker, and Author of JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters

"When Dan Berrigan eulogized Dorothy Day, he said, “She lived as though the truth were true… and she put first things first.” So, too, Jeff Dietrich, in this loving, prophetic challenge of a book."––Greg Boyle, S.J., Author of Tattoos on the Heart

"You and the LA Catholic Worker bring light in this dark time for justice and peace."––Rabbi Leonard L. Beerman, Founder of Leo Baeck Temple in Los Angeles

Jeff Dietrich was born in Newport News, Virginia. When he was nine years old his parents moved to Southern California where he was raised and educated. After college and in order to avoid the draft, he spent six months traveling in Europe and North Africa. For the last forty years, he has lived in community at the Los Angeles Catholic Worker in solidarity with the poor. Jeff Dietrich is an activist, whose numerous actions of civil disobedience have landed him in jail more than forty times. He is a cook and a kitchen worker, whose efforts have helped provide more than three million meals to the homeless on Los Angeles’ Skid Row; and he is a writer, whose eye-witness accounts of the suffering and deprivation of the poor are imbedded in his relentless and vehement exposure of the political and social system that helps to maintain their poverty.